If you haven’t heard about the Hard Case Crime imprint by now, you obviously don’t know from what John D. MacDonald called “the good old stuff.” Either that, or you’ve been locked up in maximum security way too long and the guards are swiping your mail. Because Charles Ardai’s fine paperback line has produced fifty examples of the kind of crime fiction that made paperback originals so popular back in the day, delivering tales of grit and greed complete with bad-girl covers steamy enough to make those Gold Medal models blush.

Ardai’s editorial eye has brought crime aficionados some first-rate original novels (witness the recent publication of David J. Schow’s Gun Work). But Hard Case’s main strength is reviving the work of forgotten talents who’ve been out of print far too long (Day Keene, Wade Miller, and Gil Brewer), while celebrating the work of some genuine legends (Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, and Cornell Woolrich).

So it’s really no surprise that Lawrence Block’s early work has been a Hard Case cornerstone since Ardai opened shop in 2004. “I’ve often said that Block is my favorite living crime writer, and it’s true,” Ardai says. “Reading him is an addiction for me, and I’ve read well over 100 of his books, even hunting down his early pseudonymous work to get my fix. His short stories are gems, hard-edged and flawless, and his novels have introduced characters into my life–Matt Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, J. P. Keller–that I feel I know better, and often enjoy the company of more, than many nonfictional people I know. His Scudder novels in particular are one of the towering achievements in the genre, a multi-volume fictional biography of a man’s ruin and recovery. And the Burglar novels are the perfect sorbet course to enjoy between bracing journeys into Scudder’s netherworld: light, delicious confections that leap on the tongue and delight.”

That’s as strong an endorsement as any writer could ever hope to get from an editor, a colleague, or an unrepentant fan. Ardai is obviously all of the above, and that’s good news for Lawrence Block readers. He’s used Hard Case as a bully pulpit to bring some of Block’s less familiar works to the attention of fans who love Scudder, Rhodenbarr, et. al., saving them some serious bank in the bargain (i.e. those old paperback don’t come cheap on the collector’s market).

Take Grifter’s Game, the inaugural novel of the Hard Case line. Originally published by Gold Medal as Mona in 1961, this has long been a sought-after novel by Block completists. The main character, Joe Marlin, is a con man of the low-stakes variety, a guy with enough charm to take wealthy women for a ride before leaving them cold. Cash never stays in Joe’s pocket for long, and he’s in the habit of burning hotels for payment as soon as the management comes sniffing around for same.

A skip-out in Philadelphia leads Marlin to the train station in Atlantic City, where he snatches a suitcase as a blind so he won’t look like a bad risk checking into a hotel without luggage. Things get interesting when Marlin opens that suitcase and finds a stash of raw heroin. The heroin’s connected to a woman he meets on the beach–a fine-haired Lizabeth Scott kind of blonde who makes the trip to Joe’s hotel room and bed PDQ. It turns out she’s got a husband who plays the average suburban squire while pushing Horse, and she gives Marlin a bad dose of a different kind of hunger between the sheets. Before you can picture the postman ringing twice these two are plotting murder, but things don’t turn out quite the way you’d expect once the deed is done. In fact, the ending of Grifter’s Game blindsided me, and in a very good way. It’s inevitable, brutal, and in just under two chapters it’s as sharp a horror story as I’ve ever come across. It’s also a great example of plot as an outgrowth of character, a climax completely true to the story Block built in the preceding twelve chapters.

That kind of craft is essential in a book like Grifter’s Game. Employing a lightning pace, Block feints when he needs to, dealing out the serious punches once he’s got the reader set up. Even if readers anticipates the feint, the bad business that follows is hard to dodge… and once those punches land, the guy with the book in his hands and the hanging jaw realizes that they were inevitable.

It’s a storytelling strategy Block learned while writing for crime magazines in the late fifties. Maybe that’s why I can almost hear a young guy clacking away on an old manual typewriter when I read a book like Grifter’s. There’s a certain vibe you’ll catch while reading novels written under pressure. While I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Lawrence Block, I’ve read enough of his nonfiction to understand that he wrote a lot of books just that way. His early work was fired by a fundamental determination to jumpstart his career and bring in a check that would get him to the next gig. He was smart, and he was talented, and he seemed okay with walking those first rough roads that would take him to a better place. Hey, starving in a garret while earning your chops as a writer isn’t much fun, but Block actually made it sound not-all-that-bad in one of his entertaining and informative books on writing (Spider, Spin Me a Web: Lawrence Block on Writing Fiction):

[Early in my career] I did live in a garret once, in a rather pleasant area under a sloping roof atop a barbershop in Hyannis, Massachusetts. For a couple of weeks I subsisted solely on peanut butter sandwiches and Maine sardines, and I wrote a short story every day, one of which ultimately became my first sale. (The room was eight dollars a week, the sardines were fifteen cents a can, and I got a hundred bucks for the story.)

If you know any young writers trying to get a start today in the world of webzines and we’ll publish you right now, junior! print-on-demand promises, you know that fifty years later a hundred bucks for a short story still sounds pretty fair to a lot of beginners. Some of them even live in garrets, too. Of course, if they’re quick studies that first check will make them aim for something better the next time out. It’s that kind of creative/commercial drive that put the pedal to the metal for Lawrence Block when he wrote Grifter’s Game, and it’s no different for the young writers creating Grifter’s fictive descendants today.

You’ll see that same drive in Block’s other Hard Case work, too. The Girl with the Long Green Heart is a slick novel of the long con, in which a pair of hustlers work a property scam selling “Canadian moose pasture” that’s supposedly rich in uranium to a once-burned mark who seems ready for a second scorching. Packed with detail, the story takes its time unfolding–perhaps a bit too much time compared to Block’s other Hard Case novels–but it too ends in fine, unexpected fashion, leaving room for a sequel that might have been a treat.

A Diet of Treacle is a departure, at once a Beat Generation slice-of-life and a crime story. Block manages to have it both ways–making the whole bop prosody gimmick work for him while having the good sense to play with it a little bit, too. Treacle is a story with three characters who share equal billing–Joe, a Korean War vet who’s self-aware and Immobile with a capital “I”; Anita, an intelligent girl looking for something different than she’s had and less inevitable than she’s liable to get if she parks her life in the suburbs; and Shank, Joe’s sadistic pusher friend who’s the fly in everyone’s ointment. Ultimately, what makes this brisk novel work is the things that don’t happen as much as the things that do; Treacle is a tale of dominos that begin to teeter in the opening scene but refuse to fall until the final act. When they finally do the trick, it’s explosive. The last few scenes, when Block kicks off the Beat trappings and writes a straight-up crime climax, are sharp and real. Somehow, I couldn’t help picturing Natalie Wood as Anita and Henry Silva as the switchblade-wielding Shank, in glorious black-and-white. I don’t know who would have played Joe–maybe Richard Conte’s younger brother (if he had one).

You can bet that if that one popped up on Turner Classics, I’d definitely give it a look. And that’s something else about Block’s Hard Case novels. They’re windows on a world long past, a time and a popular culture that still manages to resonate with readers of crime fiction today. If you’re a fan of old movies, you can’t help but make similar connections when you burrow into a Hard Case title. While reading Grifter’s Game, I kept picturing Robert Mitchum, and suddenly there he was. Block actually mentioned Mitchum a couple of times in the course of that novel, and each time the moment was so right that I had to laugh.

But I’m not just talking about the actors that many of us have come to know through boxed sets of noir DVDs. I’m talking about a different world. A place where con artists drink gibsons, or Jack Daniels, or Dutch beer while listening to Anita O’Day and Dinah Washington. Where hotels make bank on a “hot pillow trade,” and guys actually talk about adultery. And when they’re not fooling around with the neighbor’s wife, they’re eating artery-clogging hot pastrami sandwiches, or charbroiled steaks, or baked potatoes smothered in sour cream. But, hey, that’s just the way the mop flops in this world. Guys know they’re not supposed to carry guns onto planes, but they also know they probably won’t get frisked if they try it. On top of that, there’s no Google. You want the skinny on someone in the world of Hard Case crime, you pop ten bucks for a Dun & Bradstreet report. If you need to pass on the word, you have a hot little secretary type up a couple of extra copies using carbon paper.

That world’s on view in Lucky at Cards, which for my money is Block’s strongest Hard Case novel. Originally published as The Sex Shuffle under the pseudonym of Sheldon Lord in 1964, Lucky is the tale of card mechanic Bill Maynard, an average guy who inched into a life of crime after discovering that it was more profitable than a career as a low-rent magician. After a working over by some Chicago hoods, Maynard ends up in a quiet little suburban nowhere where an ex-B girl spots him cheating in a friendly neighborhood game of chance with her husband and his buddies.

If you’ve read Grifter’s Game, you can imagine what happens next. Only Maynard and his new friend Joyce don’t plan to murder her husband. They plan to frame him and send him to prison. See, thanks to his steel-trap will, Joyce won’t get more than a church-mouse payoff when her husband dies, so the chump has to keep on living.

Of course, it turns out Joyce’s husband isn’t much of a chump. He can actually be a straight-up bastard when he wants to. Once Lucky hit that point, I was sure I knew where it was going. I didn’t, and that was the real surprise of the book. Joyce didn’t play the role I thought she would. Her time on center-stage faded as things really got rolling, though that didn’t decrease the level of tension (or danger) in the story. Again, Block’s construct was a plot that evolved through character, driven by a protagonist who understood himself just a little too well. Bill Maynard’s not so much trapped by what his actions as by who he is, as he explains to a quiet teacher he’s dating as a blind:

“…you can only function in the gray world when a part of you is missing, Barb. The out-and-out crook is different. He’s some kind of a rebel or some kind of a nut or both, and all his lines are clearly drawn. The marginal criminal is in a different boat. He’s a human being with a certain part of his humanity surgically removed. He operates differently, functions differently, reacts to different stimuli.”

Closing in on the end of Lucky at Cards, I realized that the above was not an uncommon viewpoint for a Lawrence Block character. Neither was the clear self-portrait Block was able to paint with just a few sentences. Bill Maynard understands what he’s missing the same way he understands what he has and what it can get him. It’s figuring out what he really wants that provides the true mystery and dramatic frisson of the novel. For me, the turn of the cards on that particular hand was exceptionally satisfying.

Fortunately, there’s much more to come, both from Lawrence Block via Hard Case, and from Charles Ardai. A hardcover edition of the editor’s own novel, Fifty-to-One, written especially to celebrate the fiftieth title published by Hard Case, was published in December from Subterranean Press. The book features a character named Larry who’s a pulp mystery writer in New York in the late fifties, and while Ardai swears that Block gave his blessing for this simple fictive tip of the hat, and any conclusions we might leap to about the identity of this particular character are of the imaginary variety, we’ve still got to wonder….

But what we don’t have to wonder about is Block’s next Hard Case novel. Due in January, Ardai describes it this way: “Killing Castro is perhaps Larry’s rarest book and it’s one of his most unusual, less a crime novel than a bloody international thriller. It tells the story of five Americans offered $20,000 apiece to sneak into Cuba in 1961 and assassinate Fidel Castro. Written a year after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the book is steeped in the political situation of its time–but it remains strangely topical today, when Castro and Cuba are once again in the news. The characters come alive in the way only Block’s characters can and the climax is genuinely shocking. It’s a real treat, and we’re thrilled to be publishing it.”

From where I’m sitting, that sounds like one trip I want to make.

I’m sure Hard Case’s many readers will, too.